Top Tips for Digital Marketing in 2018

Do you want more customers and sales for your small business? Are you doing enough online? There are an infinite number of reasons as to why digital marketing is important today, but I’m just going to go over a few of them. Specifically, digital marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing, it levels the playing field for small businesses, and it’s where everyone’s attention is today.

Importance of Having a Professional, Highly Attractive Website

It’s very important to have a highly attractive, professional website that is converting your visitors. You really need to make sure that your website is doing its job. It’s essentially your home base for all of your digital marketing efforts, everything is going to lead back to there. You have to make sure that when people are on your website, they’re taking action. They’re either buying a product, signing up for newsletter, emailing you– whatever it is, you need to make sure everything on your website leads them to that purpose. Whether it be through the written copy or through the images, everything needs to have a purpose and lead them to convert.

Building Your Site For Search Engines

It is very important to be present and rank high on Google. You have to make sure that when your website is being built, all of the pages are being optimized for search engines. Whether you’re designing your own website or having someone else do it, you need to make sure that every page is being optimized for search engines. You have to add the keywords and do all the traditional SEO tasks that promote your website content. Unfortunately that’s not enough anymore. This used to be the extent of digital marketing. If you had a great website and you did your search engine optimization, that was all you needed to do. Today that’s not the case anymore. Google ranks websites not only based on SEO, but also on how active you are on social media and how often you’re posting content to your website.

In addition, search engines like to boost websites that are trusted. In the past, you could simply buy a bunch of low-quality backlinks to your site, but this isn’t the case anymore. Today, you still need backlinks to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), but you need to formulate a strategy for gaining only high-quality, industry-relevant sites in order to get a boost in the search results. All companies who are serious about ranking high in SERPs need to implement their own strategy, and that’s why some companies opt to outsource link building to an outside agency for this very reason.

Increasing Your Presence On Social Media

Next is building your presence and following on social media. Although Google is still the king of online searches more and more people are using Instagram, Facebook and all the other social media platforms to search for local businesses. When they find the business they’re looking for they use the number of followers and engagement of that business as social proof. They’re essentially making a decision on you based on how many followers you have, how many likes you get, and how many comments you get as a way of basically legitimizing you as a business. You have to make sure that you’re building a social media following not just to rank higher in Google but also for when people do find you they see that you’re legitimate and they see you in a better light.

Continuously Putting Out New and Engaging Content

The next step is to create content on social media. It’s not enough to just have a lot of followers and be present on a few social media platforms — you have to continually put out new and interesting content. You have to continually engage with your followers by creating videos, articles, and blog posts. Whatever it is, you just have to put it out continuously because like I said, Google ranks websites higher based on how active they are on social media along with everything else. That’s not the only reason for creating content, the most important reason is to drive traffic back to your website. Create content such as videos, articles, blog posts will increase your engagement and hopefully get people to click the link in your bio to take them back to your website so they can see what you’re all about. Because you invested in your website from the start, those visitors will hopefully convert into a customer or sale.

Supplementing with Paid Advertising

Sometimes the organic social media efforts we put out aren’t enough so we have to supplement that with digital advertising. Which brings me to my next tip: use social media and digital advertising platforms. This could be done by taking a piece of content and paying to amplify it across Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube or using a Pay Per Click platform such as Google Adwords. You should be using some form of advertisement to supplement the traffic on your website to bring more and more people back.

One interesting thing you can do is installing a tracking code on your website so that you can retarget the people that visit your website later on a social media platform. This greatly focuses your ad spending dollars because it takes several interactions before someone converts into a customer or a lead, and having this code installed on your website allows you to create that second, third, fourth, fifth interaction all through the ads on Facebook, LinkedIn or other platforms.

So there you have it! Make sure you follow these steps and you can really succeed with your digital marketing. Let me know if you have other digital marketing ideas and good luck!